[This talk was given to mark the publication of Sir Charles
Rey's Monarch of All I Survey: Bechuanaland Diaries 1929-37
edited by Neil Parsons and Michael Crowder, published by the
Botswana Society in Gaborone, and by James Currey in London.]

Charles Rey was incredibly rude about his three predecessors as
Resident Comissioner of the Bechuanaland Protectorate, Colonels
Macgregor, Ellenberger and Daniel - 'a trinity of the damnedest
fools Providence ever produced'. On Daniel in particular,

I disagree with Daniel on every conceivable subject -
he is the damnedest old fool I have ever struck, the most
incompetent bungler, and the most pig-headed ass. His mind, or what
he refers to in moments of enthusiasm as his mind, works at the
slowest rate that any mind could work without stopping altogether;
and it invariably works wrong...When the Almighty sets to work to
create a fool, he certainly turns out a finished
article.

Rey despised his three predecessors for incompetence or weakness
in their dealings with African chiefs and their lack of promotion
of economic development. His criticisms were echoed by his
contemporary Simon Ratshosa, an early Botswana nationalist and
polemicist. Ratshosa also accused the B.P. administration of
nepotism:'they are in many instances replaced by their sons,
relatives or friends, that is, their succession is a hereditary
one.'

The missionary Haydon Lewis,in 1913, had thought that B.P.
administrators - Ellenberger excepted - 'should be washing clothes
instead of Governing nations'; and had in 1918 remarked that the
administration's sole business was to collect revenues and receive
taxes.

A later Resident Commissioner, writing his memoirs in the
1960s-70s, was to agree that the administration had been 'mildly
dynastic', and that its recruitment had been too much on the
'office boy' system of promotion through the ranks before 1932.

Another of Rey's contemporaries, Leonard Barnes, went further
and accused B.P. administrators of reflecting the mentality of the
military police force - the Bechuanaland Protectorate Police,
formerly Bechuanaland Border Police - through which they were
usually recruited. Mary Benson picked up this viewpoint in her 1960
biography Tshekedi Khama. It was reinforced by Jack
Halpern's classic South Africa's Hostages, a study of the
three High Commission Territories (Basutoland, Bechuanaland
Protectorate, and Swaziland) in relation to South Africa, which
appeared in the influential Penguin African Library series of
paperbacks in 1965. Halpern bewailed the 'second-rateness and cheap
South African recruitment' which 'bedevilled' the B.P.
administration.

The idea of the B.P. administration having been a 'backwater
administration' of 'police force and clerical origins', up to the
rule of Rey, has been accepted as orthodoxy by modern students of
district administration in Botswana, notably by Louis Picard.

The recruitment of officers in London for the High Commission
Territories, along the lines of other British colonial service
recuits, began in 1932 as an experiment and in 1939 in earnest, and
eventually staffed the senior ranks with an Oxbridge-educated
administrative elite. The Picard thesis is essentially that
administrative continuity into post-colonial Botswana was achieved
smoothly by gradual transfer of power to a compatible local elite
headed by Seretse Khama, himself an Oxbridge man who had once
declined the offer of a position in the Colonial Service (to
Jamaica in 1951).

Rey therefore appears to have been a break in the chain of
succession of Resident Commissioners of the Bechuanaland
Protectorate - the first complete outsider without police or
clerical origins in the High Commission Territories, but also the
last non-Oxbridge man not recuited through Colonial Service
channels.

He was no military man despite his much loved title of Colonel.
On the contrary he had been a career civil servant in the Board of
Trade in London, before seeing service with a semi-official British
trading corporation in Ethiopia. His colonelcy came with the job of
Resident Commissioner - an abbreviation of the honorific title of
Lieutenant-Colonel, carried by all Resident Commissioners of the
B.P.(after 1902-03) in their capacity as formal commandant of the
Bechuanaland Protectorate Police.

Rey can be seen as one of three personally outstanding Resident
Commissioners in the colonial history of Botswana, who radically
changed the nature of B.P. administration - together with Sir Ralph
Williams (1901-06) and Sir Peter Fawcus (1959-65). But it is
misleading to see him as completely divorced from the ideologies
and administrative practices of his predesscors.

This paper will argue that Rey's career and personal
predilections can be seen as a restatement, albeit in modernized
form, of a 'mercenary tradition' in contradiction with a
'missionary tradition' in colonial administration - a contradiction
which goes right back to the origins of the Bechuanaland
Protectorate itself, and which continues to reassert itself even
after Rey.

The 'mercenary tradition' in Bechuanaland administration
combined the military ethos of frontier police origins with devoted
service to the commercial interests of monopoly capitalism in South
Africa. The first officer given the title of Resident Commissioner
of the Bechuanaland Protectorate in 1891, Sidney Shippard, clearly
falls within this tradition.

The origins of both 'mercenary' and 'missionary' traditions can
be traced to the commissioners for Bechuanaland who preceded
Shippard in 1884-85 - John Mackenzie, Cecil Rhodes, and Charles
Warren. Rarely can the contradiction between colonial ambitions of
commercial exploitation and imperial protestations of trusteeship,
inherent in colonialism everywhere , have been so starkly
contrasted as in the first two commissioners.

Commissioners Mackenzie, Rhodes, and Warren (1884-1885)

On the one hand there was the Reverend John Mackenzie, one of
the most articulate spokesmen among Christian missionaries of the
later 19th century and prime exponent of ideas of protection of
'native' interests. On the other hand there was Cecil John Rhodes,
the diamond magnate whose name has become synonymous with monopoly
capitalism and territorial expansion in later 19th century Africa,
who stood for colonization, development and exploitation of African
lands by European settlers.

Mackenzie was the first Deputy (High) Commissioner appointed for
the territory called Bechuanaland in 1884 - the area north of the
diamond fields of Cape Colony towards the vicinity of the Molopo
river. Mackenzie was a son of poor Scottish hill farmers, who had
been a missionary of the London Missionary Society in Tswana
territory since 1858. He returned to London in 1882 to campaign for
British protection of Bechuanaland from the depradations of Boer
'filibusters' from the Transvaal republic. He became the leading
voice of a humanitarian lobby appealing to parliament for justice
for the 'Bechuana'(Tswana) combined with peaceful access for
British trade though Bechuanaland to Central Africa.

In February 1884 he was appointed as Britain's Deputy
Commissioner for Bechuanaland, taking up the position at Kuruman,
his old mission station, in April 1884. In effect he had been set
up as fall-guy by Sir Hercules Robinson, the High Commissioner in
Cape Town, to fail in his duty, as he was given no police or
coercive powers to persuade the Boer filibusters to leave the
country. Moral suasion failed, and Mackenzie was forced to resign
in August l884.

Mackenzie was duly replaced as Acting Deputy Commissioner by an
ally of Hercules Robinson, Cecil Rhodes. This was the only time
that Rhodes was employed by the British government, albeit on a
part-time basis as a diversion from money-making at Kimberley and
politicking at Cape Town. He immediately dashed north to appease
the Boer filibusters of Bechuanaland and to recruit their loyalties
towards Cape Colony. Rhodes proved so enthusiastic in recognising
the land rights of filibuster-squatters that he encouraged Boers
from the Transvaal in their wars with the Tswana.

The sensational murder at Mafikeng by Boers of a British agent
called Christopher Bethell fed the outcry of humanitarians and
Liberal imperialists in Britain. The result was that a military
expedition was despatched from England at the end of 1884, equipped
with the latest technology of gas balloons and heliographic
signalling, its soldiers wearing brown corduroy rather than red
tunics.

Charles Warren, a Welsh relative of Christopher Bethell, headed
the expedition and was appointed Special Commissioner for
Bechuanaland and the Kalahari. Himself the son of an army general,
Warren was a military engineer and pioneer Palestine archaeologist,
who had served before with distinction in the Bechuanaland area
during the later 1870s and was a firm friend of Mackenzie's. A
convinced Christian as well as a Liberal, he soon clashed with
Rhodes, an agnostic. Rhodes was dismissed as Deputy Commissioner in
early 1885.

The Warren Expedition marched into Bechuanaland with Mackenzie
at Warren's side. Boer forces melted away to re-emerge as peaceful
farmers. Warren was so successful south of the Molopo that he
exceeded his instructions and went north to make treaty
arrangements with the Tswana states which now lie within the
Republic of Botswana. Hercules Robinson, the High Commissioner at
Cape Town, in Rhodes's pocket, siezed the opportunity to have
Warren recalled to Britain. Warren returned to England to fight the
issue unsuccessfully as a Liberal candidate at Sheffield, against a
Conservative candidate backed by Rhodes, in the British general
election of July 1885.

Warren and Mackenzie proposed a British protectorate over
Bechuanaland under one administration from north of Kimberley to
the latitude of modern Selebi-Phikwe. This was overruled by
Hercules Robinson, who arranged for the division of administrative
responsibilities between a colony south of the Molopo, to be called
British Bechuanaland, and a protectorate north of the Molopo which
came to be known as the Bechuanaland Protectorate. This division
took effect at the end of a financial period on September 30th,
1885 - the day that was to be known as Protectorate Day from the
1950s onwards.

Commissioner Sidney Shippard (Morena Maka)(1885-1895)

One man was appointed to the two positions of Administrator of
the colony and Deputy Commissioner of the protectorate - Sidney
Godolphin Alexander Shippard.

Shippard was later to proudly recall:

'Mr. Cecil Rhodes has often reminded me of a
conversation he and I had in the Christ Church meadows at Oxford in
1878, when we discussed and sketched out the whole plan of British
advance in South and Central Africa.'

Brussels-born and Oxford-educated, Shippard had been a judge in
Cape Colony who was called to Bechuanaland from representing
British claims at Luderitz Bay in South West Africa recently
annexed by Germany. Based at Vryburg, the capital of former
filibusters, Shippard was known for his partiality to settler and
mercantile interests.

Shippard's British Bechuanaland land commission was notoriously
partial to Boer filibuster claims. His Bechuanaland Protectorate
minerals commission was partial to the claims of Rhodes's British
South Africa Company. He was possibly in the pay of the mercantile
interests headed by Cecil Rhodes - though, unlike his three
successors as Resident Commissioner (Jameson, Newton, and
Goold-Adams), there is as yet no convincing proof. There is,
however, considerable circumstantial evidence of his assisting the
companies headed by Rhodes, and his attitude to African people is
reflected in his given Setswana name - 'Morena Maka'(Lord Lies).
After his retirement from colonial administration, he was appointed
to the board of the British South Africa Company in April 1888,
where he rendered 'wise and loyal service'.

The missionary factor was partially reasserted in colonial
administration by the appointment of the Reverend John Smith Moffat
as Assistant Commissioner for the Bechuanaland Protectorate -
resident at Shoshong and Palapye, and itinerant to Bulawayo -
between 1887 and 1895. Son of the great Robert and Mary Moffat, and
brother-in-law of the greater David Livingstone, J.S.Moffat bore
the burden of being brought up in a famous family. But he was no
friend of John Mackenzie, and was assiduously courted by the
mercantile interests that wished to take hold of Bechuanaland and
Matabeleland. He went along with Rhodes's trickery of Lobengula,
but had a fit of conscience when Rhodes tried to do the same with
Khama. Shippard and Hercules Robinson were delighted to see the
back of him in 1895.

Shippard was elevated from Deputy Commissioner to Resident
Commissioner of the Bechuanaland Protectorate in 1891 - an
anomalous title for one resident a hundred miles south of the
Protectorate's borders. At the same time Shippard and Moffat
received by unilateral British diktat the basic powers of
administration over an area as far north as the Chobe and Zambezi
rivers.

Shippard retired in 1895 when British Bechuanaland was annexed
to the Cape Colony and arrangements were being made for the
Bechuanaland Protectorate to become a British South Africa Company
territory, i.e. part of 'Rhodesia'.

Commissioners Jameson, Newton, and Goold-Adams (1895-1901)

Shippard was replaced by two Resident Commissioners to suit the
purposes of planning Jameson's raid on the Transvaal. Dr.Jameson
himself became Resident Commissioner of the Rolong and Lete areas
south of Gaborone, which were to be the springboard for the
invasion. The other Resident Commissioner, for the rump of the
territory, was Hercules Robinson's former aide the barrister and
soldier Francis Newton. West Indian-born, educated at Rugby and
Oxford he had served with Shippard for seven years as
second-in-command at Vryburg.

Newton's main achievement as R.C., while Jameson's alternative
commission was revoked, was to transfer the administrative base for
the B.P.from Vryburg to Mafikeng, the main police depot 12 miles
south of the Protectorate - probably a temporary expedient before
Salisbury or Bulawayo took charge. Newton headed a makeshift
administration in the uncertain aftermath of the failure of the
Jameson Raid, and eventually fell from grace because of his proven
complicity in planning it.

Newton was replaced by Hamilton Goold-Adams, a Royal Scots major
who had been seconded to the Bechuanaland Border Police after
participating in the Warren Expedition. (The B.B.P. had meanwhile
become Division I of the British South Africa Police - Divisions II
and III being Matabeleland and Mashonaland.) Goold-Adams, son of an
Irish sherrif, 'reserved and somewhat dour', had speculated in
B.S.A. Company shares but had not been implicated in planning the
Jameson Raid. It was his decision to keep the B.P. administrative
headquarters at Mafikeng, and not to move into the Protectorate,
which helped justify the 'North-West Frontier' forces of Colonel
Baden-Powell remaining in Mafikeng for the famous siege of
1899-1900. Goold-Adams was then posted as Lieutenant-Governor to
the newly conquered Orange River Colony in 1901.

Commissioner Ralph Williams (Kgosi Loratla)(1902-1906)

Goold-Adams's successor, Ralph Williams, was one of the Welsh
relatives of Christoper Bethell who had joined the Warren
Expedition. He however quarrelled with Warren and supported the
Conservative candidate who stood against Warren in Sheffield in
July 1885, writing a book titled The British Lion in Bechuanaland
to express his point of view. He then took the job of Britain's
representative in the Transvaal capital, Pretoria, and continued in
colonial service as Treasurer of Gibraltar and Secretary of
Barbados, moving to Mafikeng in 1901.

One of Williams' first actions was to remove the Bechuanaland
Protectectorate Police from the B.S.A. Police and from dual control
shared between Salisbury and Mafikeng. The B.P.P. was placed
directly under the command of the Resident Commissioner as its
lieutenant-colonel. Williams's second major task was to establish a
central secretariat along bureaucratic rather than ad hoc legal and
military principles. This was achieved with the assistance of his
Government Secretary, Barry May, appointed in 1904.

Williams later remarked in his memoirs:

'I think the position of the resident commissioner of
the Bechuanaland Protectorate is one of the most pleasant of those
in the gift of the Colonial Office...the only position within my
experience in which the holder could hope to live on his pay.... We
were a pure despotism and, subject possibly to active interference
by either the High Commissioner or the Secretary of State, I could
do what I chose. Fortunately in the interests of the country even
the House of Commons forgot our existence.'

Williams' Setswana nickname, Kgosi Loratla (Chief Big
Noise), conveys the character of the man as remembered by Simon
Ratshosa 25 years later:

The first glance at him...you feel at once as you look
into his stern but ugly face that you are in the mouth of an angry
lion...He could scream like wounded elephant, tables turned
up-side-down, papers thrown here and there as if by magic or a
cyclone, the walls of his office shake as if by an earth tremor at
the thundering order of this great chief.

He would never permit himself to be oil-influenced by his
subordinate officials; to this point he was very sarcastic.

He was... severe to all those who opposed his plans and above
all hetook an interest in the police that was one of his standing
pride.

Or, as Williams himself put it:

My new police force was a great success, and I was never prouder
of anything in my life than of my Basuto police.

In many respects Ralph Williams was somewhat like Charles Rey
three decades later - a more bureaucratic embodiment of the
mercenary and mercantile tradition in colonial administration. But
there were also elements of the humanitarian tradition within
Williams's administrative style, which Rey failed to recognise when
he proclaimed Williams as a worthy predecessor.

Williams had realised that effective administration by the tiny
central secretariat rested on effective cooperation with the Chiefs
who ran the everyday local administration of 'tribal reserves'. He
therefore supported them to the hilt against all comers. Linchwe
'returned my regard to the full', and Sebele 'was, I think,
extremely fond of me'.

Williams's deposition of Chief Sekgoma Letsholathebe in
Ngamiland in 1906 was therefore the exception rather than the rule
which Rey took it to be - in deposing Gobuamang, Tshekedi, Sebele
II and Molefi. Williams was more in the Mackenzie tradition of
confidence in the potentials of African society than in the
confrontational tradition of Rhodes, who had even insulted Khama in
public to his face.

Commissioners Panzera and Garraway (1906-1916)

The next two resident commissioners fit much better into the
role of stolid policemen - F.W. Panzera (1906-16) and Dr.E.C.F.
Garraway (1916-17).

Colonel 'Pan' Panzera, grandson of a British consul at Naples,
had entered the British army as an engineer officer, specializing
as a 'submarine miner' and entering the Bechuanaland Border Police
as Government Engineer and Superintendant of the Public Works
Department in 1893. He distinguished himself as the commanding
officer of British artillery during the siege of Mafikeng, and
authored two works: Questions and Answers on Gunnery and
The Officering of the Artillery Militia.

Panzera is also the most likely candidate for the official
greeted in the streets of Khama's capital, Palapye, as a well-known
lover. His particular obsession, however, was lady missionaries.
Simon Ratshosa characterized Panzera as 'lacking of necessary
controlment of the natives', but he continued to be backed up by
the extremely capable Barry May as Government Secretary.

Meanwhile,the office and powers of the British high commissioner
in South Africa were redefined in 1907-10 for the dual role of
Governor-General, representing the British crown in the Union of
South Africa, and of High Commissioner for Basutoland, Bechuanaland
Protectorate, and Swaziland - which became known as the High
Commission Territories. The resident commissionerships of the three
territories were technically in the gift of the High Commissioner,
for whom they acted in the role of lieutenant-governors, though the
Dominions Office in London usually initiated appointments from the
time of Rey onwards.

Garraway, the son of an Irish colonel, was appointed Resident
Commissioner of the B.P. in 1916. He had qualified as a doctor at
Trinity College Dublin, and had joined the Bechuanaland Border
Police as a surgeon in 1891. But he found military administration
more congenial than medical practice, and went on from Bechuanaland
through the South African Constabulary to become Military Secretary
to the High Commissioner in 1910.

According to Simon Ratshosa, Garraway cheerily told Khama that
he had thrown his medicines away 'to try another profession'.
Within two years of taking the resident commissionership of
Bechuanaland he was transferred by the High Commissioner to take
charge of the Basutoland Mounted Police.

Commissioners Macgregor and Ellenberger (1917-1928)

Between Garraway's departure in 1917 and the appointment of the
Panzera-like Colonel Daniel in 1928, there were two military
policemen of quite a different stamp who became resident
commissioners.

Panzera had been behoven to, if not craven before, mercantile
interests. He had undermined and forbidden Khama's investment in a
trading company - a royal attempt to secure 'tribal' state revenues
for the future - at the behest of mercantile interests in South
Africa and Southern Rhodesia. By contrast, James Macgregor,
appointed as resident commissioner in 1917, stood up for Khama
against the (albeit left-wing) legal and pecuniary interests of
Emanuel Gluckmann, the Johannesburg lawyer who was suing Khama on
behalf of the Birwa people.

Macgregor, German-educated son of a Scots lawyer, had joined the
British army in 1880, transferring to the Basutoland Mounted Police
in 1884. There he developed a scholarly interest in Sesotho
language and culture, and married a daughter of the Reverend D.F.
Ellenberger, a Swiss missionary of the Paris Evangelical Mission.
He assisted his father-in-law in writing the History of the
Basuto,Ancient and Modern, translating the first volume from French
into English for publication. After twenty years as an Assistant
Commissioner in Basutoland, he transferred to the Bechuanaland
Protectorate as Government Secretary in succession to Barry May.
Five years later he was made Resident Commissioner.

"A man created by the Almighty for native interests, a man who
keeps his word" was Khama's assessment of Macgregor according to
Simon Ratshosa, who added that Macgregor was despised by 'some
white men who liked the natives ruined'.

Macgregor was succeeded by his brother-in-law Jules Ellenberger.
Born in a Lesotho cave, hollowed out from a porcupine's nest but
well furnished as a home, Jules Ellenberger lived for 102 years
from fourteen years before the declaration of the Bechuanaland
Protectorate until eight years after the independence of the
Republic of Botswana.

Educated in Cape Colony at multi-racial Lovedale College and in
Paris, he joined the B.P. service as a police clerk and court
interpreter at the age of nineteen. He then spent the whole of his
working life as a government employee in the Bechuanaland
Protectorate, based in Gaborone, Ngamiland and Mafikeng, and rising
to Government Secertary in 1916 and Resident Commissioner in 1923.
The eldest son of a distinguished family of scholars and university
professors as well as missionaries, Jules Ellenberger was a fluent
linguist thoroughly conversant with Setswana culture who, according
to Simon Ratshosa, 'knew natives far better than any other
official'.

Jules Ellenberger was the most direct exponent in Bechuanaland
administration of the missionary and humanitarian tradition dating
back to Mackenzie and Warren - a tradition obviously compatible
with the paternalistic ideas of 'trusteeship' and 'indirect rule'
which were being bandied about at the League of Nations and by the
British after the First World War.

Ellenberger supported the Chiefs of Bechuanaland in resisting
the encroachments of white settler interests intent on colonial
development, which the Chiefs knew full well from experience
elsewhere in Southern Africa inevitably led to the expropriation of
land and white settlement, robbing them of local autonomy and
inevitably hastening the incorporation of the Bechuanaland
Protectorate into the Union of South Africa. Ellenberger called on
his masters in Pretoria and London to abolish all concessions held
by (white) commercial companies in the protectorate. The only way
to stop Bechuanaland being absorbed by the Union, he argued, was by
a stop on all 'development' as then conceived.

Ellenberger's philosophy appalled Leopold Amery, the new
Colonial and Dominions Secretary in London. Amery had split the
Dominions and Colonies into separate portfolios in 1925, with the
High Commission Territories falling under the Dominions Office
because of their 'inevitable' absorption by the Union of South
Africa (or possibly by Southern Rhodesia in Bechuanaland's case).
Amery's whole position was that the three territories should be
developed by a dualistic policy, promoting both British settler
enterprise and provision of native welfare facilities, so that the
territories would tip the balance towards British interests when
they joined the otherwise Afrikaner-dominated Union.

Privately Amery accused Ellenberger of keeping 'the natives
quiet and happy...like a game reserve of wild animals' (or a human
Whipsinade) in order to keep them out of the Union. In print Amery
was kinder, remarking that Ellenberger was

'a fine specimen of the old type of Protectorate
official...Steeped in native thought and ways his one concern was
for the welfare of his proteges, but suspicious of anything that
might upset their accustomed way of life. My heart, but not my
head, was with him and I chose, in Colonel (Sir Charles) Rey, an
active successor all out to put the Bechuana on their feet
economically.'

Commissioners Daniel and Rey (1928-1937)

Charles Rey was therefore deliberately chosen as a
counter-weight against the 'missionary' tradition of colonial
administration as exemplified by Jules Ellenberger.

But first there was an interim resident commissioner of the old
'mercenary' type - the unfortunate Colonel Daniel, backed by the
even more unfortunate and according to Rey 'raving mad' C.L.O'B.
Dutton as Government Secretary. (Dutton also came from the Lesotho
missionary network.) Rey was obliged to understudy Daniel for six
months until that memorable day, 1st April 1930, when Rey became
'monarch' in his own right.

Charles Rey was the 'new broom' who saw himself as bringing a
new age to the Bechuanaland Protectorate, and his achievements as
an administrator were considerable and should not be demeaned. He
fell in with the modish Dual Policy, propagated by Leopold Amery as
well by Lord Lugard and the Indirect Rule school, combining
development of European interests in Africa with facilities for
African welfare. But his interpretation of dualism was essentially
that of Leopold Amery, his patron, following in the track of
Governor Coryndon of Kenya, rather than the philosophy of Lugard
and the'theorists' of the Colonial Office.

Amery appointed Rey, Anthony Kirk-Greene tells us, over the
heads of the Colonial Office nominees for the resident
commissionership - Philip Mitchell and Granville St.John
Orde-Browne being names that were canvassed.

Rey by contrast came out of an essentially commercial form of
bureaucratic background, in the Board of Trade and the Abyssinian
Corporation, with little sympathy for the welfare measures in which
he was willynilly engaged. This comes out in his attitudes towards
British workers and African intellectuals despite being secretary
of the Unemployment Grants Committee in London and being chairman
of the Board of Advice on Native Education at Mafikeng. During his
years as Resident Commissioner he also became an enthusiast for the
supply of African labour to the Witwatersrand gold mines.

By the end of his career, Rey stood unabashedly on the side of
colonial exploitation and settler development, calling for the
incorporation of Bechuanaland into the Union of South Africa. It is
this increasingly 'mercenary' aspect of Rey which helps to explain
the dramatic twist in the attitude of a later Resident
Commissioner, Anthony Sillery, towards the Rey Diaries.

In 1973 Anthony Sillery, biographer of John Mackenzie, who saw
himself as coming out of the trusteeship tradition of Tanganyika
colonial administration, was shown an edited edition of the Rey
Diaries (prior to that published as Monarch of All I Survey) by a
publisher. Sillery's first response was to be bowled over by the
sheer exhuberance of the diaries:

'Rey was a distinguished man, a man of energy, ability
and perception. His diaries are a faithful report of what he
achieved against tremendous odds'.

A month later Sillery had developed a very different view, and
wrote back:

'I have now read the Rey diaries from cover to cover
and I am sorry to say that...they...show Rey as vain, egotistical,
contemptuous of people, especially African people, impetuous and
totally lacking in patience, and absurdly prone to dramatization.
The diaries also contain inaccuracies and I suspect that Rey often
raised the tension in order to show himself in a good light.
Colonial administration was often a trying & sometimes, tho'
rarely, even a dangerous business, but it was not like this...least
of all in Bechuanaland....Much of his writing appears to me to be
fantasy, not representing the real man at all.'

Sillery concluded with another point, which is all the more
telling about the ethos and loyalties of colonial
administration:

'Rey does not come out of the diaries as a very
attractive type of colonial administrator....The world is full of
people who sieze any opportunity to knock hell out of the Imperial
past, and these diaries might, or rather would, furnish another rod
for the back of the poor Colonial Service.'

[A later draft of this paper was published as 'Mercenary and
Missionary Traditions in Colonial Administration: Colonel Rey and
the Resident Commissioners of the Bechuanaland Protectorate,
1884-1966' in J.F.Ade Ajayi & J.D.Y. Peel, Michael Crowder
Memorial Volume]
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